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Current Events, Recent Posts

My Pack is Heavy

Video 13 Comments

Below is a  video a Marine Brother, Don Wolf, with whom I had the distinction to serve sent to me a while back. It has been in my computer ever since and I cannot tell you how many times I have clicked on it and watched. And each time I have great difficulty keeping my eyes clear enough to watch it.

I finally decided that I would take the time and post it. I have a problem though and that’s while I watch it, I think of all the slimy, gutless, pitiful millennials, spineless Gen Zers, and  wokeness, liberal, pronoun , transgender, and climate purveying bastards who have destroyed this once great nation. All I can find in my heart of hearts to say to those pieces of shit is — until you have worn the boots shut your damn mouth. And if you have worn the boots, yet have become one of those pieces of shit I just spoke of, you have sold your soul and I hope you rot in hell.

I am so sick  of hearing of the crime, broken justice system, abuse of power, stupid laws being passed to satisfied those ignorant shit heads.  Who the hell do those liberals in Colorado think they are that they have the right to decide who is or isn’t on a ballot for a national election.. And for all you sickly Californian’s, all I have to say is, maybe we should have a referendum on this year’s ballot with a  yes or no vote to give that shit state in which you hide back to Mexico. You don’t deserve to be one of the 50, and neither do you CO. I am a firm believer in State’s Rights, but you two abuse that privilege everyday. If you don’t want to be one of the 50, get out!

The biggest POS  of all who lives in our WH and all those pieces of garbage he has assigned to key cabinet positions because they were queer, transgender, lacked morals and principles, or the color of their skin is unbelievable, Your VP screwed her way to where she is and your press secretary is a disgrace to your office. I actually think she just might be dumber than you. We all know who is running this country; he’s into his third term. I wonder who he will find to get him his fourth? But then the libs are so stupid they just might try and elect that imbecile for his second term.

I’m tired of all this, and while I do not want to wish a few months of what life I have left, I cannot wait for November. Enjoy the video, make it full screen, and tell me  how many times you watch it brothers? Come on now be honest.

God, please help us, PLEASE!!!!

 

Current Events

Why Trump Should Win

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And why the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Bruce Thornton

Aug 14, 2020

Less than three months from election day, Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans keep telling us (and themselves) that President Trump “is in trouble” in his bid for reelection. Trump’s enemies chant poll numbers like incantations, even though that juju failed spectacularly in 2016. They harp on Trump’s media-manufactured “failures” like his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his response to the ongoing riots instigated by Black Lives Matter and its Antifa brown-shirts. And as has been true from the start, the bulk of their criticisms are really about subjective and self-serving standards of “comportment” and “decorum” and “norms”  that reflect the bipartisan “cognitive elite” and big-government functionaries.

But a more sober analysis suggests that the president has a faithful and energized base and a record of accomplishment compared to the Dems’ lunge to the lunatic left. Moreover, the spectacle of civic destruction, increasing violent crime, and nakedly partisan and authoritarian excesses on the part of blue-state governors and mayors will give Trump a decided edge with the bulk of ordinary Americans.

First, Trump’s economic success has been stalled not because of any missteps by his administration, but by a pandemic originating in totalitarian China and worsened by its willful obscuring of the virus’s origins and lethality. Voters with common sense and fairness know that the current recession is not Trump’s fault, and that having rescued the economy once, he can do so again. They also can see that blue-state governors have needlessly exacerbated the economic damage by imposing draconian and arbitrary lockdown orders based not on science, but on their increasingly obvious desire to wound the president politically even if it means immiserating their own citizens.

In contrast to Trump’s successful economics, over the last few months the Democrats have abandoned their traditional center-left governing philosophy and embraced a socialist ideology that for over a century has serially failed everywhere it has been tried. Indeed, during this year’s Democrat presidential primaries, the party establishment was trying to neuter Bernie Sanders and his faction just as they did in 2016. They know that socialism and its growth-killing policies like the Green New Deal are not a winning platform for the mass of voters outside the bi-coastal blue enclaves.

Yet the Dem standard-bearer Joe Biden has endorsed wacky proposals like eliminating cheap carbon-based energy, restoring punitive taxes, and increasing the redistribution of wealth through handouts like free college tuition and Medicare for all, which more centrist Democrats know are electoral poison. It’s hard to imagine that in just six months the same voters who the Dems thought would be repelled by such policies have suddenly develop affection for them.

So on that score, come November voters will have a choice between returning to the policies that created an economy that reduced unemployment to historic levels, elevated GDP to a level Obama’s court-economist claimed was impossible, increased growth in wages, and brought back manufacturing jobs that Obama sneered would require a “magic wand”; or trying once again failed policies of intrusive job-killing regulations, bloated and overweening federal bureaucracies, tax-rates that punish the productive, and an ever-expanding roster of citizens dependent on government overlords rather than looking to their families, communities, churches, states, and own characters for support in managing their lives.

Next, Donald Trump has fiercely waged war on the political correctness and the toxic “cancel culture” it engenders. He excoriates with brutal wit the preposterous charges of thought-crimes like “racism” or “xenophobia,” exposing their vapidity and hypocrisy. He shrewdly contrasts the Democrats’ neglect of average black citizens whose vote they take for granted, with his own achievements such as sentencing reform, increased aid to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and historic rates of black employment. And he mocks the prissy, pearl-clutching dudgeon of the “woke” left who ransack American history for grievous offenders to condemn, even as the monstrous crimes and genocides of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their imitators like Castro, Chavez, and Maduro, are ignored or celebrated.

Additionally, Trump has called out the Dems for endorsing the “woke” culture’s totalitarian intolerance and opposition to free speech, not to mention their eagerness to gut the Bill of Rights. On November 3, voters will have a choice between a president who defends their unalienable rights like freedom of speech, assembly, and worship, along with the right “to keep and bear arms”; or a party that wants to limit or eliminate all of them by passing ever-more onerous gun laws, imposing censorship through “hate speech” laws, and privileging casinos and violent riots over churches and temples.

Finally, he has battled the Salemite persecutions of men falsely accused of “sexual assault.” He vigorously supported Bret Kavanaugh in 2018 when the Democrats turned his televised Supreme Court confirmation hearings into a Democrat star-chamber prosecution of the jurist for an alleged 36-year-old sex crime his accuser could not substantiate with a speck of evidence. And he has ended some of the same sort of unjust, unconstitutional practices rife on college campuses for decades––an early and particularly malevolent form of “cancel culture” that has destroyed the lives of hundreds of college students.

All that would be enough to put Donald Trump back in the White House. But that’s not all.

On top of Trump’s record, the Democrats’ candidate is one of the most disastrous since George McGovern in 1972. In nearly fifty years of  “public service,” Joe Biden has no record of legislative accomplishments to run on, and the few he used to brag about, such as the 1994 “tough on crime” bill, he has disowned, denounced, and desperately apologized for. The bulk of his time in the Senate has been spent tending to the interests of banks chartered in his home-state of Delaware. It was Biden who made sure government-backed student loan debt cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. Biden’s and his family’s sketchy financial dealings with China are even more troubling given that we clearly are in a cold war with that totalitarian thug-state. No surprise that the intelligence community has determined China prefers Biden in the upcoming election.

And don’t forget Biden’s history of plagiarism, gaffes, lies, and specious fabrications in anecdotes about his past. He serially accused the driver of the truck involved in the car accident that killed his wife and daughter of being drunk, thus ruining the man’s life, when in fact he wasn’t and Biden’s wife was responsible for the crash. And he has lied about his law-school career. As Derek Hunter writes on Town hall,

Everything Joe said in that exchange [with a voter in 1987] was untrue. He didn’t have an academic scholarship; he hadn’t won a moot court competition; he wasn’t listed as an outstanding student. Even though his claim of being in the “bottom two-thirds” of his class and finishing in the “top half” makes no sense because there’s enormous overlap between the two, he actually finished 76th in a class of 85 students. 

From facing down a gang-banger named “Corn Pop,” to attempting to visit Nelson Mandela in prison, Biden has repeatedly told preposterous lies. And don’t forget, there are yards of footage of Joe inappropriately putting his hands on women and girls and sniffing their hair, offenses that if committed by a Republican would have sparked a national spasm of MeToo hysteria.

And if that troubling record of duplicity and unwelcome fondling isn’t enough, it has been clear for months that Biden suffers from the early stages of dementia. FOX News has made a number of video catalogues of Joe’s lapses in memory and bursts of anger of the sort typical of people with dementia. This bodes ill for Biden, as David Catron has pointed out. Reviewing the collapse of Mike Dukakis’ presidential campaign against George H.W. Bush in 1988, Catron writes, “[T]he liabilities of [Biden] in 2020 involve the same issues that dogged [Dukakis] in 1988 — mental fitness to handle the duties of the presidency, difficulty connecting with the minority voters without whose support he can’t win, and the willingness to brand any opponent a racist who dares to bring up ‘law and order.’”

Finally, the “law and order” issue that Catron mentions, one the Republicans have owned since 1968, has been daily advertised in the coverage of killings, injuries, vandalism, and looting springing from “woke” protests and riots, which have led to forced police stand-downs and violent crime rates skyrocketing in blue-state cities­­­––in the first six months of this year, Chicago’s murder rate increased 38%, with 440 deaths including four children under 10 murdered over five weeks. Worse, the Democrats have endorsed and rationalized the violent protests, nor has candidate Biden, the alleged “moderate,” forcefully condemned it. This state of affairs is reminiscent of 1968, when the “silent majority” expressed its anger at the riots and bombings of the Sixties by electing Richard Nixon.

Biden’s handlers know all this, and so have sequestered him in his basement, letting him out only briefly and reducing his opportunities for impromptu speaking. And they’re working mightily to get the presidential debates cancelled, for they know that in an unscripted, personal encounter, the street-fighting orator Donald Trump will beat Biden like a rented mule. It seems highly improbable that anyone can become the leader of the most powerful free country in history by hiding from the voters.

Nor will Biden’s pick for vice-president, California senator Kamala Harris, help him overcome these challenges and deficiencies. Harris is one of the most progressive and aggressively “woke” members of the Senate. She has endorsed the far-left policies of the Sanders-AOC wing like the Green New Deal, Medicare For All, forgiving student-loan debt, free college tuition, and restoring the tax-and-spend excesses of the Obama years that gave us one of the most sluggish recovery from a recession ever. And she is a clumsy, off-putting campaigner, with little appeal for the moderates Biden supposedly attracts.

But Harris will be a problem for leftists as well. Seeking future votes, as a prosecutor and AG Harris took a tough-on-crime tack that saw high incarceration rates for low-level drug offenders, a sore point with the BLM faction of the party. And don’t forget her vicious attacks on Biden during the primary campaign: She clearly implied that he is a racist for saying nice things about segregationist senators like Strom Thurmond, and said that she believed the woman who has accused Biden of sexual assault. Her cringing, treacly acceptance speech graphically highlights her career-long opportunism and hypocrisy, and no doubt will make effective ads for the Trump campaign.

So what will be the saner choice in November: an incumbent president with a style that puts some voters off, but cheers others, who battles against the intolerant and illiberal “cancel culture,” and who has one of the best records of achievement in a president’s first term? Or a mediocre career pol with no record of achievement, a long history of gaffes, corruption, and lies, an economy-killing policy program imposed by the party’s extreme left, and a “woke” ideology that sanctions violence not just against people and property, but America itself and its unique virtues and achievements?

Trump should win on November 3, but as a philosopher once said, “Should ain’t is.” The stakes couldn’t be higher: saving our Constitutional order of unalienable rights, citizen sovereignty, and limited government; or watching it descend further into a technocratic despotism over dependent clients, as our safety and security are increasingly compromised.

Originally posted 2020-08-16 15:07:46.

Recent Posts

Open Up!

4 Comments
What an excellent read. I am amazed by our sheep mentality with this Virus. Several governors are really exceeding their powers e.g. NJ and MI. New terms like “overclass” and “underclass” fit the situation at hand very well, You have to ask yourself, “What about us, do we not have a say in this?”

Those who are anxious to open up the economy have led harder lives than those holding out for safety.

By  Peggy Noonan

 

 

 

 

 

May 14, 2020 7:17 pm ET

PHOTO: BARBARA KELLEY

I think there’s a growing sense that we have to find a way to live with this thing, manage it the best we can, and muddle through. Covid-19 is not going away anytime soon. Summer may give us a break, late fall probably not. Vaccines are likely far off, new therapies and treatments might help a lot, but keeping things closed up tight until there are enough tests isn’t a viable plan. There will never be enough tests, it was botched from the beginning, if we ever catch up it will probably be at the point tests are no longer urgently needed.

Meantime, we must ease up and manage. We should go forward with a new national commitment to masks, social distancing, hand washing. These simple things have proved the most valuable tools in the tool chest. We have to enter each day armored up. At the same time we can’t allow alertness to become exhaustion. We can’t let an appropriate sense of caution turn into an anxiety formation. We can’t become a nation of agoraphobics. We’ll just have to live, carefully.

Here’s something we should stop. There’s a class element in the public debate. It’s been there the whole time but it’s getting worse, and few in public life are acting as if they’re sensitive to it. Our news professionals the past three months have made plenty of room for medical and professionals warning of the illness. Good, we needed it, it was news. They are not now paying an equal degree of sympathetic attention to those living the economic story, such as the Dallas woman who pushed back, opened her hair salon, and was thrown in jail by a preening judge. He wanted an apology. She said she couldn’t apologize for trying to feed her family.

There is a class divide between those who are hard-line on lock downs and those who are pushing back. We see the professionals on one side—those James Burnham called the managerial elite, and Michael Lind, in “The New Class War,” calls “the overclass”—and regular people on the other. The overclass are highly educated and exert outsize influence as managers and leaders of important institutions—hospitals, companies, statehouses. The normal people aren’t connected through professional or social lines to power structures, and they have regular jobs—service worker, small-business owner.

Since the pandemic began, the overclass has been in charge—scientists, doctors, political figures, consultants—calling the shots for the average people. But personally they have less skin in the game. The National Institutes of Health scientist won’t lose his livelihood over what’s happened. Neither will the midday anchor.

I’ve called this divide the protected versus the unprotected. There is an aspect of it that is not much discussed but bears on current arguments. How you have experienced life has a lot to do with how you experience the pandemic and its strictures. I think it’s fair to say citizens of red states have been pushing back harder than those of blue states.

It’s not that those in red states don’t think there’s a pandemic. They’ve heard all about it! They realize it will continue, they know they may get sick themselves. But they also figure this way: Hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy taken down, which would mean millions of other casualties, economic ones. Or, hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy is damaged but still stands, in which case there will be fewer economic casualties—fewer bankruptcies and foreclosures, fewer unemployed and ruined.

They’ll take the latter. It’s a loss either way but one loss is worse than the other. They know the politicians and scientists can’t really weigh all this on a scale with any precision because life is a messy thing that doesn’t want to be quantified.

Here’s a generalization based on a lifetime of experience and observation. The working-class people who are pushing back have had harder lives than those now determining their fate. They haven’t had familial or economic ease. No one sent them to Yale. They often come from considerable family dysfunction. This has left them tougher or harder, you choose the word.

They’re more fatalistic about life because life has taught them to be fatalistic. And they look at these scientists and reporters making their warnings about how tough it’s going to be if we lift shutdowns and they don’t think, “Oh what informed, caring observers.” They think, “You have no idea what tough is. You don’t know what painful is.” And if you don’t know, why should you have so much say?

The overclass says, “Wait three months before we’re safe.” They reply, “There’s no such thing as safe.”

Something else is true about those pushing back. They live life closer to the ground and pick up other damage. Everyone knows the societal costs in the abstract—“domestic violence,” “child abuse.” Here’s something concrete. In Dallas this week police received a tip and found a 6-year-old boy tied up by his grandmother and living in a shed. The child told police he’d been sleeping there since school ended “for this corona thing.” According to the arrest affidavit, he was found “standing alone in a pitch-black shed in a blue storage bin with his hands tied behind his back.” The grandmother and her lover were arrested on felony child-endangerment charges. The Texas Department of Family Protective Service said calls to its abuse hotline have gone down since the lock downs because teachers and other professionals aren’t regularly seeing children.

A lot of bad things happen behind America’s closed doors. The pandemic has made those doors thicker.

Meanwhile some governors are playing into every stereotype of “the overclass.” On Tuesday Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf said in a press briefing that those pushing against the shutdown are cowards. Local officials who “cave in to this coronavirus” will pay a price in state funding. “These folks are choosing to desert in the face of the enemy. In the middle of a war.” He said he’ll pull state certificates such as liquor licenses for any businesses that open. He must have thought he sounded uncompromising, like Gen. George Patton. He seemed more like Patton slapping the soldier. No sympathy, no respect, only judgment.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called anti-lockdown demonstrations “racist and misogynistic.” She called the entire movement “political.” It was, in part—there have been plenty of Trump signs, and she’s a possible Democratic vice presidential nominee. But the clamor in her state is real, and serious. People are in economic distress and worry that the foundations of their lives are being swept away. How does name-calling help? She might as well have called them “deplorables.” She said the protests may only make the lock downs last longer, which sounded less like irony than a threat.

When you are reasonable with people and show them respect, they will want to respond in kind. But when they feel those calling the shots are being disrespectful, they will push back hard and rebel even in ways that hurt them.

This is no time to make our divisions worse. The pandemic is a story not only about our health but our humanity.

Originally posted 2020-05-17 11:36:23.

Current Events

Should I Social Distance??

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The writer uses thoughts of several scientists to  make a very compelling case for this whole social distancing issue to be useless. You decide.

‘Social Distancing’ is Snake Oil, Not Science

By William Sullivan

5/11/20

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York says that it’s “shocking” to discover that 66 percent of new hospitalizations appear to have been among people “largely sheltering at home.”

“We thought maybe they were taking public transportation,” he said, “but actually no, because these people were literally at home.”

“Much of this comes down to what you do to protect yourself,” he continues.  “Everything closed down, government has done everything it could, society has done everything it could.”

It’s your fault, he says to the hospitalized New Yorkers who loyally complied with his government directive.  But here’s an interesting alternative theory as to why, mostly, old people who are staying at home are being hospitalized.  What if the government directive to close everything down and mandate “social distancing” actually made the problem worse?

Dr. David Katz predicted precisely this outcome on March 20, in an article that is proving every bit as correct in its predictions and sober policy recommendations as Dr. Anthony Fauci has been proven incorrect — which is another way of saying that the article has proven flawless, so far.

Dr. Katz writes:

[I]n more and more places we are limiting gatherings uniformly, a tactic I call “horizontal interdiction” — when containment policies are applied to the entire population without consideration of their risk for severe infection.

But as the work force is laid off en masse (our family has one adult child home for that reason already), and colleges close (we have another two young adults back home for this reason), young people of indeterminate infectious status are being sent home to huddle with their families nationwide. And because we lack widespread testing, they may be carrying the virus and transmitting it to their 50-something parents, and 70- or 80-something grandparents. If there are any clear guidelines for behavior within families — what I call “vertical interdiction” — I have not seen them.

One might be inclined to simply accept this as an unintended consequence of “social distancing,” but accepting that would require there to be some kind of h the cost.  Is there?

Very likely, you already instinctively know that the guidelines suggesting that it’s somehow helpful to keep a six-foot space between healthy people, even outdoors, is not based on science, but just an arbitrary suggestion we’ve been conditioned to accept without evidence.

And your gut feeling would be right.  There’s a reason that “social distancing” wasn’t a buzzword common to the American lexicon prior to 2020.  There’s very little science behind “social distancing” at all. 

“It turns out,” Julie Kelly writes at American Greatness, “as I wrote last month, “social distancing” is untested pseudoscience particularly as it relates to halting the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. On its website, the CDC provides no links to any peer-reviewed social distancing studies that bolster its official guidance.” 

There’s a reason for the lack of peer-reviewed studies on the CDC website.  She continues:

The alarming reality is that social distancing never has been tested on a massive scale in the modern age; its current formula was conceived during George W. Bush’s administration and met with much-deserved skepticism.

“People could not believe that the strategy would be effective or even feasible,” one scientist told the New York Times last month. A high school science project—no, I am not joking—added more weight to the concept.

“Social distancing” is very much a newfangled experiment, not settled science.  And, Kelley writes, the results are suggesting that our “Great Social Distancing Experiment of 2020” will be “near the top of the list” of “bad experiments gone horribly wrong.”

You also don’t have to be a scientist to also instinctively know that “two weeks to flatten the curve” becoming “America must lock down until a vaccine is created” is more social experimentation than science.  But what the data have fleshed out, beyond the point of argument, is that the proximity of one human being to another has proven to be a very small factor in determining the impact of Covid-19 infections. What’s far more important is which human beings happen to be in close proximity of one another.

According to Dr. Steven Shapiro and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center:

Crowded indoor conditions can be devastating in nursing homes, while on the USS Theodore Roosevelt 1,102 sailors were infected, but only 7 required hospitalization, with 1 death. This contrast has significant implications that we have not embraced. Epidemiologic prediction models have performed poorly, often neglecting critical variables.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt had a crew of 4,800.  Given the acute sample, testing was holistic.  This yields an actual infection rate of roughly 23 percent, and among those infected, the fatality rate is 0.09 percent.  Among the Roosevelt’s entire crew of assumedly healthy and able-bodied sailors, on a floating Petri dish, during the thick of viral outbreak that shut down all schools and placed healthy citizens across America under house-arrest, the fatality rate was .002 percent.

It seems more than obvious that there is little sense in quarantining the young and healthy.  As Dr. Shapiro also observes:

Our outcomes are similar to the state of Pennsylvania, where the median age of death from COVID-19 is 84 years old.  The few younger patients who died all had significant preexisting conditions.  Very few children were infected and none died.  Minorities in our communities fared equally well as others, but we know that this is not the case nationally.  In sum, this is a disease of the elderly, sick, and poor.

Here’s another thing you likely already know.  Politicians and the media are committing to damage control to hide all of these facts from you.  In fact, finding any news relating to Dr. Shapiro’s somewhat revelatory comments online is, so far, quite difficult.

That’s because, for the people who pushed “social distancing” and destroying the economy as an absolutely necessary evil, this is a matter of self-preservation.  If this information were widely known, citizens might be more inclined to demand that schools and parks and restaurants and malls be opened.  But if schools open tomorrow, without testing, and there is not a surge in hospitalizations or deaths, then the obvious question is why the schools closed in the first place.  If restaurants and other shuttered businesses open without a spike in hospitalizations and deaths, then why did they ever close?

There’s value in the media and government officials maintaining the public perception that the costs of “social distancing” have been offset by its benefits.  But while those benefits are elusive in the data, and require mountains of presumption to imagine that they even exist at all, the costs of “social distancing” couldn’t be clearer.

As Dr. Steven Shapiro concludes:

What we cannot do, is extended social isolation. Humans are social beings, and we are already seeing the adverse mental health consequences of loneliness, and that is before the much greater effects of economic devastation take hold on the human condition….

In this particular case, the problem we’re not going to be able to fix in the short term is the complete eradication of the virus. The problem we can fix is to serve and protect our seniors, especially those in nursing homes. If we do that, we can reopen society, and though infectious cases may rise as in the Theodore Roosevelt, the death rate will not, providing time for the development of treatments and vaccines.

At this point, this is little more than common sense, and the truth can’t continue to be suppressed for much longer.  It’s becoming more and more obvious that it’s well past time to take a more tactical approach to mitigation, as Dr. Katz suggested back on March 20, allocating resources and efforts toward protecting and caring for those most at-risk, and ending this soul-crushing and economy-crashing experiment with holistic “social distancing.”

 

 

Originally posted 2020-05-12 10:38:16.

Current Events

Moving the Goalposts

12 Comments

The doctors make a good case for opening America sooner better than later, but are they right? I wonder what the docs on the task force think of of this? If I was waiting for a life saving operation right now, I would be concerned. Would you?

Four Reasons it is Safe to Open America

Jonathan Geach, M.D.

Apr 16 · 9 min read
Original Goal: Flatten the curve

The curve of new infections is declining and we do not need to wait for additional testing or a surveillance apparatus to be in place to reopen America.

In response to warnings that millions of Americans could die and the carnage COVID-19 created in Italy, state and local governments instituted drastic social distancing in America. In the meantime, the epidemiological curve in the US has followed the trend seen in Europe and is well past its peak.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) model estimates that the peak of deaths in the U.S. occurred on April 13, 2020. This would seem to indicate the time to loosen social distancing and allow a return-to-work has arrived.

Despite this new information, several public health officials have said that May 1 may be too soon to reopen. They claim that we don’t know enough about the virus, and it won’t be safe to reopen America until we have improved testing and surveillance.

Original Goal: Prevent Healthcare System Saturation

The healthcare system is not overwhelmed, it is underwhelmed and being damaged.

The purpose of “Flatten the Curve” was to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed with patients suffering from COVID-19. The reality is that the healthcare system is now underwhelmed and healthcare workers are being laid off and furloughed in droves as a result of healthcare centers having neglected patient care not related to COVID-19 in fear of a COVID-19 surge that failed to materialize on a nationwide basis. This means tens of millions of patients are failing to receive the medical care they need in a timely manner. Almost every hospital outside of the hot spots is empty.

The dramatic reduction in healthcare utilization and capacity is by no means limited to small, country hospitals. Mayo Clinic is empty: 65% of the hospital beds at Mayo Clinic are empty, as are 75% of the operating rooms. This is the world’s premier medical center. If Mayo Clinic is empty, imagine how dire the situation is at smaller, community-based healthcare centers. Given the complexity of the patients referred to Mayo Clinic, its emptiness alone will have a significant negative impact on healthcare outcomes.

Healthcare under utilization leads not only to patient care being delayed, which will likely result in deaths from delayed cancer diagnoses; it also leads to the loss of countless jobs in the healthcare industry, many of which will never return. Even if the patients that are not being seen at this time are seen several months in the future, many will still suffer negative health outcomes. In Medicine, timing is of the essence and diagnosing and treating a patient today is more beneficial than diagnosing and treating the same patient for the same condition in the future.

If the goal of the shutdown was to flatten the curve and prevent healthcare system utilization, why are we still under a shutdown when the healthcare system is significantly underutilized and tens of thousands of healthcare workers are being terminated or furloughed? Why are we still denying non-COVID-19 patients the care they need when hospitals are sitting idle and laying off staff in droves? The only surge we’ve seen thus far is with respect to initial weekly jobless claims; tragically, there’s a good chance we will see a surge in suicides later this year as well.

Original Goal: Determine the true mortality

The evidence that the true mortality is much lower than early estimates continues to mount.

In order to calculate the true risk of dying of COVID-19, we have to separate case fatality rate (CFR) from infection fatality rate (IFR). Case fatality rate is the chance someone will die after testing positive for a disease. In many studies, the case fatality rate has fallen from 3–4% to around 1%. However, the CFR is not what we think of intuitively as the true mortality of the disease. The true mortality rate, or infection fatality rate (IFR), is the proportion of those who died of the disease among those who were infected, whether or not they were tested.

For example, the CDC states that 247,785 people tested positive for the flu this winter and about 24,000 died. This makes the CFR for the flu 10%; nine in ten people who get the flu don’t die of it! While only 247,785 people tested positive, the CDC estimates that 39 million people were actually infected with influenza this winter. Hence, the IFR for the flu is around 0.1%.

New data supports the idea that SARS-CoV-2 is much more widespread than previously believed. Researchers have tried an indirect approach to approximate the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 by comparing the incidence of excess influenza-like infections that are correlated to areas of COVID-19 infection. “This corresponds to at least 28 million presumed symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 patients across the U.S. during the three weeks from March 8 to March 28.” They go on to note, “[T]hese results suggest a conceptual model for the COVID-19 epidemic in the U.S. in which rapid spread across the U.S. is combined with a large population of infected patients with presumably mild-to-moderate clinical symptoms.” This is a dramatic change from earlier projections and drops the projected IFR down to around 0.1% — or basically the same as this year’s flu.

Now, I know many people will say, “But look at New York. Look at how the hospitals were full and we almost ran out of ICU beds and ventilators. COVID-19 is nothing like the flu.” To these objections I must point out that COVID-19 kills people through a prolonged process that generally keeps people in an ICU on a ventilator for two weeks before they die. Most people who die of the flu have a much faster disease process.

A new study in The New England Journal of Medicine supports the claim that COVID-19 is much more common and mild than first believed. Researchers from Columbia University in Manhattan tested every woman who presented in labor for COVID-19 from March 22 until April 4. Fifteen percent of the women tested positive for COVID-19, but, of these, eighty eight percent were totally asymptomatic. Also interesting, none of the women who tested positive were even sick enough to seek COVID-19 care; they simply came to the hospital to have a baby.

Eighty-eight percent of positive women were asymptomatic

Given the age of child-bearing women, these results provide further evidence of COVID-19’s generally mild course in young people with limited co-morbidities.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt has been in the news for an outbreak aboard the ship. The US Navy is testing every sailor on board. Of the 4,800 sailors, 600 tested positive and 60 percent of those were entirely asymptomatic. Much like the diamond princess, as time passes the fates of those onboard should give us a much better knowledge of the true risk of hospitalization, intensive care and death from the disease. However, unlike the Diamond Princess, this is a much younger group.

Edit:4/18/20: The first prevalence antibody study from Stanford was released on 4/17/20. After sampling the blood from 3,300 people, researchers found that 48,000 to 81,000 people in Santa Clara county had been previously infected. Only 1000 people tested positive in the county. They estimated the IFR from 0.12 to 0.2.

Many people are actually claiming that the large number of asymptomatic people with the disease requires prolongation of the shutdowns. The large asymptomatic group does quite the opposite. It demonstrates that the number of people who have already had the disease is very high and the actual infection mortality rate is much lower than we previously believed.

Original Goal: Prevent a catastrophic second wave

If there is a second wave, it will most likely be this fall which will give us plenty of time to prepare

The biggest concern voiced by public officials is that opening the economy is unsafe because it could, “Pour gasoline on the fire.” These officials don’t understand that most people who recovered from the infection are now immune and, thus, contribute to the development of “herd immunity”. If the next wave comes, the peak will be lower or, like in South Korea, where social distancing was only voluntary, it may be just a period of a low rate of new cases until herd immunity is build.

If the current level of herd immunity is so low that a second wave builds, it will take at least several months. The CDC estimated that it will likely be at least 150 days before a possible second wave. This would push it back to the fall at the earliest. A study published in The Lancet also states it would be several months before a possible second wave.

Personal protection equipment (PPE), testing, and surveillance may not be optimized today, but all should be in place by this fall. At that time, politicians and scientists can determine how the elderly and vulnerable can be protected without needing to interrupt the economy.

In addition, the shutdowns are slowing if not preventing the development of herd immunity. This increases the chance and possible severity of a second wave of COVID-19 several months after the shutdowns are lifted.

A recent study from South Korea states that about 100 people who previously had COVID-19 and tested negative have now tested positive again. This has led to rampant media speculation that there may not be lasting immunity from COVID-19.

Dr. Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist from Harvard University, wrote an editorial on this subject in the NY Times. He shows how similar viruses in the past have given long-term immunity. The SARS virus in 2002 gave two years of immunity on average. The MERS virus from 2012 gave approximately three years. He believes that COVID-19 will confer at least a year of immunity.

Regarding the South Korean concern about a lack of immunity. Dr. Lipsitch states that likely “these patients had a false negative test in the middle of an ongoing infection, or that the infection had temporarily subsided and then re-emerged.” One small study should not keep us from opening the economy over a mostly theoretical concern.

The idea of herd immunity is simple: Once enough people in society are immune to a disease, if one person becomes infected, the chance they give it to someone else is less than one. It is estimated that 80% of the population would need to be immune to have true herd immunity. However, if we have even half that, we would slow the increase of the virus dramatically. This would make surveillance easier and decrease the chance that a second wave could overwhelm our health care system this fall.

In summary

Continued shutdowns threaten our economy, our health and even our healthcare system.

The state of our economy is not just a monetary risk, it is a health risk. When people lose their jobs, they typically lose their health insurance. The British Journal of Psychiatry found that there were more than 10,000 “economic suicides” as a result of the 2008 recession. Similarly, a 2016 study from The Lancet found that there were an excess 260,000 cancer deaths as a result of the recession. These statistics also fail to mention the increased domestic violence, increased child abuse and home loss when schools and businesses are closed.

In spite of the changing goalposts: The number of new cases is declining. The mortality is likely much lower than early estimates. Those who have been infected by the disease will most likely be immune for at least a year. Finally, the lives saved by starting the economy sooner vastly outnumber those that could be saved by extended shutdowns.

Jonathan Geach, M.D.

Ankur J. Patel, M.D.
Knut M. Wittkowski, PhD, ScD
Lacy Windham, M.D.
Ashkan Attaran, M.D.
Jason Friday, M.D.

Originally posted 2020-04-19 11:05:01.